Blogging for the Gray Wolf

This video is dedicated to the short-sighted flat earthers, who can’t seem to grasp the meaning of trophic cascades, or the benefit of having apex predators, like the wolf, on the landscape. Maybe for one second you can stop talking about elk and realize nature is interconnected. Predators strengthen prey species and balance the ecosystem. That’s why they were put on this earth!

“And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being”….Black Elk Speaks

As we drove back from the rally am stunned by not only the fractured landscapes but the gold rush mentality of the locals.2 yrs ago the frack boom was less pronounced. The hostility of the frack transplants and general money orgy presents the greatest threat to not only the wolf but all wildlife we have ever faced.

Inherent in many of the humans who are at present walking upon this land, is the false idea that they will walk upon another land after their deaths.
They neither care about this magnificent Earth, nor any of the magnificent individual creatures that live on, in above, below it.
They are impoverished by their imagination, but are dangerous because they cannot care for life.

Yet, they, too, will one day subside in their caskets, and be pushed up to the surface of Earth again, whether by volcano or uplift, and the few kilograms of their mass which they sought to sequester for eternity, will again join, like all the rest of life, the mysterious mixing, in which we can sense all who lived before and all who will ever come.

The wolf participates in this mixing, and in this joyous quest for breath, and the breathless perception of beauty that is life.

Should you learn how they live, with what verve and solicitation for their own, and what curiosity and playfulness and focused intent, you will gain insight into the way of all life, of each life.
The balance itself comes from full participation; each wolf knows this in eagerness. That eagerness is seamlessly a part of the behavior of all others, and changes the shape of Earth itself.

Is it that there is too much manipulation by many humans, or more so that there are too many humans manipulating? I’ve seen the befores and afters of human technology, of building, of taking water from the rivers, of human domestication of certain animals. The prizing of human population and economic growth has before my eyes taken the lives of countless individuals before their time. Bear, salmon, wolf, tree, coyote, hawk, dolphin, ungulate, pinniped. I have seen many deaths of each of these and more, some of whom personally knew my presence, and that of wolf.

Look again: who builds life, diversity? Who destroys? with whom will you make your life?

I am rapturous over the theory of trophic cascades. The wolves keep the elk moving from place to place so there is not as much overbrowsing, and everything, everything is the better for it. It’s just too bad that human hunters don’t want to hunt as they did in ages past when they actually had to find deer and elk. Conservationists? They are just riding on the coattails of conservationist of the past. It takes more than just throwing money at something.

This blog is dedicated to the memory of Wolf 253, the beloved Yellowstone Druid wolf named Limpy, who was shot and killed in March 08, on the very day ESA protections were lifted for the gray wolf, by the then Bush Administration.